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Nature studies
IT'S ABOUT 9 A.M. at IslandWood, and the members of the Pond
group have eaten their breakfast and donned their rain gear. Out on
the trail they gather around their leader, a graduate student
named Katie Frickland. She's armed with a backpack loaded
with a first aid kit and water bottles, and has a walkie-talkie
hanging on her belt.
"Let's do our cheer," she says, hoping to warm them up. "P. O.
N. D. Light to the bottom so we can see," they shout together. With
a pond, you can see to the bottom, Frickland tells us later.
She has the kids shut their eyes and asks them about the hike in
the woods they took the night before. "Did anyone see the moon?"
They all raise their hands. "Did anyone hear the wind?" More hands.
"Did anyone feel scared?" One girl lifts her hand high above her
head. Frickland takes note. The instructors at IslandWood strive to
make the outdoors less frightening. A brief solo hike in their
first days here gives the children a chance to be alone in the
forest, if only for a few minutes.
"Each week kids get on a ferry, some of them for the first time
in their life. They take this boat on this adventure. Half an
hour later they're no longer in the urban center where they
live," says Ben Klasky, IslandWood's executive director.
"They're here, and they're scared, because they think a bear
is going to get them."
For many of these kids it's the first time away from home for
more than one night, the first time they've heard a frog croak.
"It's way beyond camping," says Windy Tuttle, a parent
chaperone from Silverdale who is visiting IslandWood for the second
time. "I've been watching these kids come out of their shells. And
they take something home about where they live and their
environment and how to take care of it when they leave."
There are no bells, no swapping off from one classroom to
another. Every morning the children step outdoors and find meadows
to explore, a bird blind to inhabit, a tree house to climb, a bog,
a lake, and trails galore. And at night they sleep in cozy
bunks, each with a private window that looks out to the
trees.
Each child receives a field journal, a workbook for recording
animals they discovered, plants they've identified, and the changes
in the weather. They learn animal tracks, how to identify scat, and
whether the organisms they find in the soil and the water are
tolerant of pollution. They learn how to tell a sword fern from a
maidenhair.
They also learn greater ecological lessons. The Pond group heads
to a meadow to meet up with two other groups for a game of
"owls, mice, and seeds." The children take turns being owls,
mice, or seeds to see what happens when one population outgrows its
food supply. Besides an opportunity to run and scream, the game
gives them a view of population ecology.
They learn to rely on each other. After lunch, the children of
the Pond group stop on the trail for a game called "car
wash," which encourages them to step forward and be described by
their classmates. As a boy steps into the center of the circle, a
girl says to him, "Even though you're quiet, most of the time you
have great ideas." He beams.
As the Pond group disappears into the trees, the Ravine group
comes out of the woods into a sunlight-filled Port Blakeley
cemetery, a public site tucked into the southeast side of
IslandWood's acreage. The children have notebooks, and paper and
charcoal to take rubbings of the gravestones. The exercise is
designed to give them a sense of the history and cultural make-up
of the community over the past century. Judy Batschi, another
parent chaperone, watches in awe. "Do you see that boy over there,"
she says, pointing to a small guy named Jacob who is earnestly
taking notes from a headstone. "He has his teacher astounded.
He doesn't talk in class, but out here, he really
participates."
After the exercise, the children gather around their group
leader at the edge of the cemetery and sit among the graves. Jacob
waves his hand to tell the group that he discovered some tombstones
written in Japanese. That spectacle of children opening up at
IslandWood is a weekly event, according to Brainerd, who has
witnessed it a few times herself.
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